Category Archives: Tyler Cowen is my Favorite Blogger

Tyler Cowen’s Philosophical Opus

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He discusses it with Russ Roberts.

I claim we should use an intergenerational discount rate of zero. That is, the distant future we should not discount at all. There’s positive time preference within a life, but over the course of generations no one is sitting around impatiently waiting to be born. And once you adopt that move, the further-out future becomes very important for our deliberations. And then the gains from getting this higher compound rate of economic growth, they really do just overwhelm anything else in the calculation.

It is an argument for thinking about long time horizons when making economic policy. That is easier said than done, of course.

From Prosperity to Poverty

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Ricardo Hausmann writes,

Income poverty increased from 48% in 2014 to 82% in 2016, according to a survey conducted by Venezuela’s three most prestigious universities. The same study found that 74% of Venezuelans involuntarily lost an average of 8.6 kilos (19 pounds) in weight. The Venezuelan Health Observatory reports a ten-fold increase in in-patient mortality and a 100-fold increase in the death of newborns in hospitals in 2016.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Justin Fox blames the resource curse.
Pointer from Mark Thoma. I think that Fox, like too many economists, wants to look at material factors and ignore the role of ideas. Venezuela is cursed more by socialism than by oil.

Write no matter what

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Joli Jensen says,

I recommend spending at least 15 minutes a day in contact with your writing project. This offers frequent, brief, low-stress daily contact with your writing project which helps keep the project “write-sized.” It can include “ventilation,” which is spending 15 minutes writing about how you don’t want to work on your project at all.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I don’t ventilate. Instead, sometimes I change the subject. If I have a project that is stalled, I might write about something else completely, like folk dancing. A few times I’ve even started to write short stories. Interesting characters and situations, weak plots. I seem to stop writing before I get to any action scenes.

I need long walks and bicycle rides to get writing done. I put ideas together in my head, and then I transcribe them when I get home. That way, I have built up momentum before I sit down at the computer.

Blogging is a form of “write no matter what.” A significant proportion of my longer projects began as blog posts.

Americans are super-rich

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Consumption in the U.S., per capita, measures about 50 percent higher than in the European Union. American individuals command more resources than people in countries such as Norway or Luxembourg, which have higher per capita GDP. The same American consumption advantage is evident if you look at dwelling space per person or the number of appliances in a typical home.

He says to look at total U.S. health care spending relative to the size of our economy in this context. If you put GDP in the denominator, we look like an outlier. But if you put consumer spending in the denominator, it looks fairly normal.

And yes, I too have cited the Random Critical Analysis piece.

Clark Medal trends

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Concerning the John Bates Clark award, Beatrice Cherrier and Andrej Svorenčík write,

From the citations of the medalists from the late 2000s onward, one get the impression that all economics has indeed become applied

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I agree with the authors’ view of the trends. In my essay, I pointed out that in the 1970s, what I refer to as the “peak math” era, the Clark medalists had published heavily in the most mathematical journals of the time, Econometrica and the Journal of Economic Theory. The more recent winners appear very little in those journals.

Zero pushback

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That is what Tyler Cowen gives Atul Gawande when he says,

In the 1950s, we had no real FDA, and you had the opportunity to put out, to innovate in all kinds of ways, and that innovation capability gave us modern cardiac surgery and gave us steroids and antibiotics, but it also gave us frontal lobotomies, and it gave us the Tuskegee experiment and a variety of other things.

I thought that this comment of Gawande’s was pure demagoguery, and it should have received pushback.

The primary reason we abhor frontal lobotomies and the Tuskegee experiment is lack of patient consent. Patient consent is not the focus of the FDA at all. You do not need an FDA to enforce the patient’s right to consent. In fact, you can argue that the FDA acts contrary to patient consent, because it tells people what drugs they cannot have even if they are fully aware of the evidence regarding the risks of the drugs and the data on the drugs’ effectiveness.

Another definition of culture

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From Pseudoerasmus.

‘Culture’ is defined as any information inside the mind which modifies behaviour and which got there through social learning — whether from parents, or peers, or society at large. Non-genetically inherited ‘content’ would obviously include technology/knowledge (“how to remove toxins from edible tubers”), beliefs (“witches can cause blindness”), and customs (use of knife & fork). But it also includes what economists would describe as “informal institutions”, i.e., mating systems, ethical values, social norms, etc.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Apparently this is an updated version of an earlier essay. I recommend the piece as an excellent survey. Many sentences are worth quoting, including:

One might argue, the real institutional difference between developed and developing countries is actually a “social capital” gap: there are just many more coordination failures in developing countries.

Of course, you do not explain North Korea vs. South Korea on the basis of a “social capital gap.” But I think that the concept does have value in many other instances.

If you want to jump to the bottom line,

So to answer the question at the head of this post, “where do pro-social institutions come from?” — if ‘bad’ institutions represent coordination failures, then intelligence and patience must be a big part of the answer.

And, yes, he does get around to citing Garett Jones.

Looting the state governments

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The Mercatus center ranks the fiscal condition of the fifty states.

The worst, at number 50, is New Jersey, followed (preceded?) by Illinois, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Maryland. California is 43, and New York is 39. So by my count 4 of the bottom 5 states and 6 of the bottom 12 are known for powerful public-sector unions. I see that as a likely cause of fiscal weakness in those states, and I doubt that those six will climb out of trouble.

Human conflict: a Girardian view

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Dan Wang writes,

If one is a Girardian, then there is perhaps no greater catastrophe than the growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges. Is it not worth fretting that the people running the country are coming in higher numbers from these hothouse environments at a young age, where one is inflamed to compete over everything and where tiny symbolic disputes seem like life and death struggles? How much of the governing class has fully adopted this attitude, and to what extent can we see our recent political problems to be manifestations of this tendency?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Read the entire essay.

Wang links to a useful summary of Girard’s ideas.

If people imitate each other’s desires, they may wind up desiring the very same things; and if they desire the same things, they may easily become rivals, as they reach for the same objects. Girard usually distinguishes ‘imitation’ from ‘mimesis’. The former is usually understood as the positive aspect of reproducing someone else’s behavior, whereas the latter usually implies the negative aspect of rivalry.

Again, there is much more at this link. Wang’s idea is that when you throw a bunch of similar people together ini college, you make it natural for them to desire the same things and to be prone to conflict.

I admit that I am still trying to fully grasp these ideas.

What to Study?

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Scott H. Young writes,

Assuming you were to fulfill that high-minded goal of education, how would you do it?

I find it doubtful that the traditional university curriculum would be the best way to do that. Probably the best way wouldn’t involve an institution at all, but be something you undertook on your own.

He proposes a curriculum in terms of 10 years. I have converted it into percentages:

30 percent immersion in foreign cultures
10 percent philosophy
5 percent religion
5 percent world history
20 percent math and sciences
10 percent art
5 percent music
5 percent meditation
5 percent economics and psychology
5 percent practical skills (carpentry, sewing, etc.)

My comments:

1. A lot depends on what you assume somebody knows when they leave high school. 3

2. A lot also depends on what you take to be the goal. Let us suppose that the goal is to learn in a well-rounded way.

3. Off the top of my head, some tweaks:

10 percent philosophy
15 percent math and sciences (emphasize statistics and biology, not so much advanced math or advanced physics)
5 percent world history
15 percent human culture (including economics, politics, sociology, and psychology)
10 percent arts and literature (art, music, dance, literature)
10 percent personal fitness (sports, exercise, meditation)
10 percent practical skills (include cooking, computer programming)
25 percent immersion in foreign cultures

4. Learning is social. Who are you spending time with? That is a major issue. I think that Tyler Cowen, who provided the pointer, would agree.